Dreams Are Not Enough

Except in dreams, you’re never really free.

-Warren Zevon

Three weeks ago, my job laid me off, with two weeks’ pay in advance, and an invitation for rehire after this whole pandemic blows over, which I guess was nice of them. When I first got the email, I kind of wished they had just let me go entirely, instead of hanging me over a cliff for however long this quarantine lasts. Two weeks’ pay will last me almost exactly that long, after rent and groceries. If they had fired me outright, I could have started looking for another job right away. Now I’m hamstrung by the email. I definitely sensed an implicit expectation that I’d come back. But I guess I should be thankful. So many folks are out of work and out of money now. So many are dying. I am young and I am healthy. I’m doing fine and I know it.

Two weeks ago, is when I promised myself I’d never go out of the house, except for groceries once a week, and emergencies. I’m only twenty-four, so I’m not really worried about myself, but I’d hate to get someone else really sick. I’ve broken my promise a few times though. I admit it. Once I went out in the middle of the night for cigarettes. I thought I’d gotten enough for the week, but all this shit has me more anxious than usual, so, naturally, I’ve been smoking more than usual. You can’t really prepare for an experience until you’ve experienced it, I guess. Was it Heidegger who said that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards? Or was it Kierkegaard? I can’t remember.

We can all get through this brief period of loneliness easily. I’m sure of it. My girlfriend and I video chat for several hours every day, and it’s much better than just talking on the phone, or texting. I can hear her voice, but I can also see the faces she makes when she uses her voice. I can see how she covers her mouth with her left hand when she’s embarrassed, or how her face suddenly goes taught with surprise when she realizes she’s left the tea boiling over again. There are times, however, when I catch myself thinking I’d be willing to infect both of us, and several other people on the way to her apartment, just to sleep in the same bed as her again.

Last week is when the hand first came to visit. One morning, I can’t remember which day, I found an enormous handprint splayed across the dirty window above my mattress. I haven’t cleaned, or done much of anything with the window for three years besides look out of it, so it couldn’t have been mine. Yet there it remained, clinging to the glass like a chubby tarantula. A handprint that you can’t account for is unsettling enough, but, as I knelt on my bed and stared at it, there was so much more I couldn’t make sense of.

I live in a fourth-floor apartment, so you’d have to get yourself up to a pretty frightening height just to leave a handprint on my window, and, even if you wanted to, the fire escape is under the window in my living room, and there’d be no way to climb the smooth stucco between my bedroom window and the ground. Perhaps someone could’ve gotten onto the roof and leant over the edge to make the print? No. Excluding the fact the hand was facing upwards, there are two other apartments above me, so whoever it was would have had to be nearly fifteen-feet tall.

And it was so perfectly formed and intentional in its placement, so wanting to be noticed, that, strangely, the first thing that came into my mind were the big, proudly colored hand-print turkeys I made every Thanksgiving in elementary school. Maybe it was this memory, so redolent of childhood and the security it affords, which kept me from being as concerned as I probably should have been.

My first adult dose of fear came the next morning. The handprint had migrated inside. Well, not completely inside. It was split at the top of the sliding pane, its fat palm resting on the outside, pressed hard onto the glass with its skin spread out like a resting water balloon. And, stretching over the top and across were four well-knuckled fingers and one thumb. The pane slides to the right horizontally, so it cannot be grasped from the top like that. It had simply oozed through the top of the window. The first print was gone, and in its place rested what I swear was the exact same pattern of dirt and grime that had been there before it came. I imagined it rushing in like air to fill the newly emptied space.

I remember rubbing out the handprint furiously with my right palm, and then opening the window so I could stretch my arm around the pane and rub away the small part of the hand that hadn’t slithered into my bedroom. I also cleared out a nicely giant space where the first print had been. This last act was done completely without thought. I remember this clearly, because it seemed that, instead of deciding to do it and doing it, I just looked up and discovered I’d done it.

I must have done it. The window was open, and there was a smeary open patch in the center of the pane. There was also quite a sizable hole in my memory, one that I could feel inside my head, as if air were leaking out of it. The mind can’t tolerate holes, any more than any other vital organ, and it’s because of this that the healthy mind, my healthy mind, can fabricate memories as quickly as it can lose them. After sitting down in bed for a few seconds, trying to force down the warm anxiety coming up my throat and towards my face, I realized I knew I had cleared away the dirt, and because I knew it, I could see it being done, and seeing is as good as believing. A memory was made, and the hole was plugged.

It must be so awful to have dementia. I think losing my mind frightens me more than anything else – more than pain – more than death.

Dirt can’t just rush in like that, can it? My great grandparents survived the dust bowl, where every waking moment was a battle against dirt that came through the walls and tried to go down your throat while you ate, like those ocean parasites I read about last year that swim into fish’s mouths and eat their tongues. Was I thinking of that when I did it? Did I rub away an omen of disaster and infestation like someone rubs away the evil eye?

No, I don’t think so. I’m quite sure I thought all that up just now, and am just trying to make sense of nonsense by grasping at stories told to me in childhood. There’s my childhood again. I’m just a big fucking baby is what I am.

Perhaps, by wiping away the dirt, I was, in my own way, reasserting the usual way of things – claiming a space for the laws of physics and the rules of everyday life: the rules that keep handprints on television screens and kitchen countertops and crime scenes, and away from unreachable fourth-floor windows. Dirt shouldn’t rush back in when it’s been asked to leave.

I’ve got a nice big couch in the living room, purchased with my generous municipal salary, and that’s where I slept that night, cowering in its cool leather folds while an entire season of The Office unspooled on my television. Silence would have been deadly that night. It leaves too much room for thought. If I was up and around, eating at the kitchen island, or clutching at another beer in the refrigerator, the headphones had to be in if the television was out. The air conditioner had to keep up a constant drone, and the ceiling fan stopped for no one. Around two in the morning I started to get up, wanting to peek inside my bedroom, but then exhaustion hit me like a sheet of rain and I fell into a lush black sleep.

* * *

Pure sunlight, unfiltered by the protective moistness of clouds, is one of the worst things ever for a frightened person to see - especially in the morning, after a dreamless, beery sleep, without any nightmares to be delivered from. I opened my eyes, saw the walls glowing a burnt yellow and leafy shadows quivering against the blinds, and immediately wanted to shrink into a ball and never wake up again. The night before, as I drifted off, the walls had been a lovely incandescent orange, with small islands of faint blackness around the edges. I wanted that back so badly. (“I see a red door and I want it painted black.” Mick Jagger would understand.) Everything suggestive of blankets, soothingly cool air, and motherly comfort had been scorched away by the sun. I think it was around seven.

I must have lingered on the couch for a few more hours, bouncing in and out of sleep, because everything was blazing afternoon-white when I finally crept into my room to brush my teeth. Pathetically, like a scared child hiding their eyes at a horror movie, I blocked my peripheral vision with my right hand so I wouldn’t see the window. Once in the restroom I closed the door and began furiously working away at my teeth. Dental health has always been a sore point. It’s the one aspect of my life I feel I have absolute control over, and by clinging to this sense of control I’ve run my teeth into a state of near ruin by overbrushing. Several thousand dollars spent for repair over ten years.

In and out of the restroom as fast as I could go, now with my left hand protecting me from the window. I shuffled like an idiot because I’d just showered, the towel around my waist restricting my movement. Once again, I’m a victim of my own cleanliness. Careful to arrange my clothes on the back of the couch the night before, I dressed in the safety of the living room – underwear, socks, black jeans, tank-top undershirt, deodorant, button-down shirt (I’ll roll up the sleeves when I’m done with everything else.), belt, and dress shoes that I’ll double knot, in that order. This arrangement is relaxed enough for a day spent slinking around the house foraging for junk food and watching television, but not so relaxed that I feel like that’s what I’ve actually done all day. Pajama bottoms and wife beaters have a way of reminding you of your own laziness when they’re left on for too long, like an ingrown toenail, or uncut hair so long that you start setting it on fire when you go to light your cigarette.

* * *

Thanks to the tv and the phone, I’ve stayed out of my bedroom for nearly the whole day. Say what you want about electronics, but I think they’ve brought us even further out of the cave than people think. I know the original civil rights movement got going without the help of social media, but no one can deny its role in sweeping up millions upon millions of people, seemingly overnight, into a revolutionary phalanx against the police and the brutality they’ve been doling out with near immunity for centuries. Can you imagine gathering enough people in just three weeks to scare the city of Minneapolis into actually disbanding its entire police department without smart phones and social media - without people all over the nation, all over the world, having moral epiphanies in bed and on the toilet? There’s also the extortionary power of social media that no movement of any kind can do without. People aren’t any less stupid or racist than they used to be, but they’re less inclined to express it when they know it isn’t just the girl taking their lunch order who’s going to be telling her friends about it.

Or maybe this is all a great storm before a very long, very deadly calm – our swan dive into a future as sparsely attended as a runoff election for railroad commissioner. A world that weighs as much as ours does now, a world as accelerated and as hot as ours, can no longer support the neat division between work and play that we’ve all grown up with. (“Work while you work. Play while you play. This is the way to be happy and gay,” as my grandmother used to put it, in her Greatest-Generation way.) The work to be done is too grave and too necessary to leave for someone else, and now playing is so fucking dangerous you have to wear a mask to do it. (Now we only have ourselves to play with, and everyone knows that you’ll go blind if you do that.)

Technology can be our short circuit between a life of service and a life of happiness, our way of reclaiming some momentary sense of agency while we try to go about our own life without hating ourselves for sitting by while it’s lived for us. Our dreams are not enough. We need recycling, and thumbnail-sized rainbow flags during pride week, and big black squares that will stay up until our next really good selfie comes along. Maybe all these outlets for pseudo-activity are just now accumulating to a degree where they’re starting to make a difference, like some pathetic collection of loose change that’s just now big enough to buy us a plane ticket. Keep adding up millions of wrongs for long enough and you’ll eventually get a right.

Panicked slothfulness is slowly invading my life. I drink every day. I’m drinking now. Anyway, what the holy hell am I talking about? “Further out of the cave?” I’ve shrunken even further into a tangle of disgusting habits that are gnawing away at everything I value about myself. Maybe this is one of those soap-bubble moments of moral resolution that swirl and shine on the surface, but implode the moment you start to handle them. Nevertheless, I’ve made up my mind, for once in a long time. I’m going to charge into my room right now and make the bed. I’m going to plug my phone into my nightstand charger like I’ve always done and stand up straight and shake that phantom handprint with the firmest take-no-prisoners handshake I can muster.

* * *

The door is opening, and my hand is pushing it open, and I’m dissociating from myself like mad. I’m rushing away from myself, my hand is sliding out of me. It feels alien – something clinging to the door like a numbed over barnacle, and it’s pushing open the door, and I’m watching it. I’m being pulled, helplessly, into danger, as I watch my hand like a parent watches their dumbly inquisitive child yank a pot of boiling water off the stove and onto their face.

Why am I doing this? This is the absolute definition of something that can be put off until tomorrow. What do I hope to gain by this silly confrontation with something I’m not even sure happened? After several days and nights of rolling around my living room like a forgotten cat toy, I’m half convinced I made up this hand-print business so I could have something concrete to be afraid of - something more tangible than invisible illnesses that pounce on you from the air and shrivel your lungs.

Sometimes I can’t remember if I’ve said something, done something, in a dream, or in reality, but god help me, I feel no such uncertainty about this moment, because this reality has the inexorable propulsion of a dream, and this dream has the grip of reality. Horrible fusion. Siamese actuality. The door is open now, and I smell soil and sweat, and see the dusty dull light of late afternoon forcing its way through the closed blinds, filling the room with a rotten gray haze that looks like old dishwater. Overcast skies have been locking in the summer heat for the past few days, and when I smoke on the balcony, I immediately develop a choking film of perspiration all over my body, and the warmth in the air makes every breath of smoke a stone in my throat and every moist puff of hot wind a plastic bag over my head.

Standing in the center of the room.

I am standing, just barely so, and having to concentrate all of my energy inside my knees to stop them from giving way. Hot balls of effort throb around the bones. The sensation, all sensation, is personal again, because what I am seeing has brought me back into my body. What I am seeing is thuggishly pushing me up against a wall of my own flesh, making every round-trip churn of blood as horribly distinct and concussive as a loud engine on a quiet night. I feel the first touch of panic, because I can feel myself going, can see my vision narrowing. I must think of something, anything, to keep from fainting. The thought of spending the night on the floor, with this thing watching me drool into the carpet, is unbearable. It will get me if I stay. It will come off the bed and squeeze me from the bottom of my feet up to the top of my neck, so that my head pops off and my life shoots out of me like old toothpaste squeezed up from the bottom of the tube.

That’s it! Think of shooting. Think of leaping liquid. I can’t believe I’m doing this, but I must. What an ignoble way to die if this doesn’t work, your last moments spent thinking of the heavy porn you watched the night before, your body crumpling forward onto the dying stiffness of your last erection ever. Mustn’t think of such things right now. Must concentrate. Must, must must! Must build the image of a wall in my brain to keep out the probing minds of the devil children from outer space. Okay now I can think about that, think about the cable movie I saw last night. Must think of that. Or I can think of the word “must,” repeating it until it begins to sound so naggingly strange that I have to turn around and walk out of this deadly room and back into the kitchen so I can look up its etymology on Wikipedia. I like etymology. I like porn too. Think damnit, think! Now leave! Turn around and leave this room like you’ve done a million times before you worthless frozen fucking piece of shit! Do you want to die? You must want to, because you’re still here.

I can’t keep this up. Coming down fast. Helter skelter. Resistance is wearing me down even faster than surrender. The thoughts leave as fast as they come, and trying to keep them real and in front of me is like trying to nail oatmeal to the wall. Effort is giving way to clarity now, and I feel a strange satisfaction as all of my thoughts leave, as all of my inner life quiets and melts, and my brain opens itself willingly to the terror in front of me. This must be what it feels like for captains to go down with their ship, with nothing but the whine of folding metal and the cracking of glass to keep them company as they move down into the black yawn of the sea. A sad honor, but an honor, nonetheless.

I shall tell you everything I see as I go.

So that you may see and believe.

* * *

Tilting backward. I’m tilting away. Oh my god they’re everywhere.

The handprints – wet, moist, glistening, smeary – pour from the open window, down the wall, and into my pillow as thickly and powerfully as a waterfall pours into a ravine. They writhe around each other, seeming to form eddies and whisps in their long tumble down to my mattress, different prints clasping one another, then parting again further down the wall, then coming together again more tightly, a thousand permutations of the same hesitant embrace flattened together until they merge into a striated tree of fingers. Everything is the color of dirt and shit, deep blacks, deep browns, and when the hands hit my pillow, they seem to have exploded into an excremental bloom across my white sheets and bedspread.

My vision is narrowing into the view from a cardboard tube.

All across the wall and the wrinkled fabric the prints are thick and raised, the brushstrokes of a murderously angry artist. Stretching out across the mattress, they carry on their cycle of embrace and break up, oscillating without end until they reach the end of the mattress, where they stop. The pattern resembles the upward blasting cone of a conventional explosion in the desert. No complicated cold-war mushrooms, just the upward surge of pure TNT firepower, articulated in the language of human hands. Smells bloat the air as I pass out – soil and old meat, a loud party of politic worms. I’m going under and I have to leave you, which doesn’t mean I love you any less.

* * *

I’d be an idiot if I weren’t less than pleased about being doomed. But a strange sort of awareness is returning to me now that I’m unconscious. “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man,” said Johnson, and the closest an unfortunately evolved ape like me can get to that is in this world which governs the whole rest of the animal kingdom. We rightly revile the murderer, and rightly admire the majesty of a giant cat pouncing upon the helpless herbivore. The world of dreams brings us back to into that horrible space where moral judgement becomes meaningless. If I kill you, rape you, in a dream, I don’t have to apologize. And right now I’m swimming deeper and deeper into it, away from my city job, away from my girlfriend and her expectations, away from the life of the well-principled, goal-oriented man and into the realm of the unconscious give and take – where every fear and every joy is realized in an unprincipled swirl of sensation.

Pink lungs are swimming up towards me in the darkness, a pristine, fleshy bloom of mint-condition alveoli and elastic flesh. They are beautiful – completely untouched by tobacco smoke. They are my lungs, as they existed when I was born and up until my senior year in high school, when Jacob Sanchez gave me my first cigarette. I remember leaning the passenger seat back as low as it could go so no one could see me smoking.

What was I hiding from? I’m searching for an answer, and it suddenly occurs to me there is none. I mean, there is an answer, but it’s a stupidly obvious, unprofound one. I was seventeen, and it was illegal, and I could have gotten in big trouble. No need to complicate things, now that I’m dying – to make them slippery Rubik’s cubes, the kind we spend our whole lives agonizing over. As soon as I turned eighteen, I began wolfing down cigarettes as often and as hungrily as my lungs could handle, often smoking until I felt sick, so sick I had to crawl into bed and rest my scorched throat so I could get up the next day and do it all over again. When I turned twenty-one, booze entered the picture not only as an indispensable social lubricant, but as a respiratory narcotic, boosting my cigarette capacity into the stratosphere until I could chomp down two whole packs in the course of a three-hour conversation like they were breadsticks.

Must concentrate now. Gravity is pulling me deeper, past the dark bowl at the bottom of my lungs and into my stomach. Leaving my lungs is frightening. It’s like leaving the warmth and tolerance of my parents’ queen-sized bed, the one they let me flop on for hours after school. Experienced rapids rafters call the place below the surface the “washing machine,” where you relinquish all control and trust your frail, flailing skeleton to the mercy of the churning water. The only way out is down. You must gather your strength, your sense, and plunge down to the bottom most part of the flood, where the water is calmer, but also where your screams can’t be heard above the surface. Here now, I push myself down from the bottom and fall upwards into my body, deeper into my guts than I’ve ever dared to go.

Bile bubbles up in an angry hiss as the heavily processed T.V. dinner I ate last night works its way through my gall bladder. In the background I can feel my lymphatic system kicking into gear, in lock step with my gut, working to vet and eliminate all the noxious shit that floods my body every evening – mudslides of nicotine charged tar, fizzing globs of cheap lager beer mixed together with French fries, and the cornucopia of germs I swallow when my fingers brush over my lips as I smoke. There’s an order and arrangement to all this, an enveloping sense of purpose, that can’t be felt inside a torrent of water or a swirl of wind. The feeling helps me, makes me feel safe again as I continue on.

For some reason, the inside of my stomach is lit with a sort of soft, dull orange light, but I can’t see any fixtures. There are no bulbs, no chandeliers, no lamps, just a sourceless glow. Looking up, the vault of flesh above me isn’t wrinkly pink and moist like I imagined it would be. It’s smooth and dry, and in the orange glow looks like the ceiling of an ancient church, the polished stone lit up by hundreds of votive candles. Whenever I read books set in the age before electric lights, I can’t help but imagine each interior scene as lit by fluorescent tubes and 60-watt ceiling bulbs. Maybe that’s what this churchly glow is – my modern mind’s eye adapting itself to the premodern landscape of the human gut.

As it flows around my knees, the stomach acid is pleasantly caustic, similar to the agreeable burn of whisky. How I still have knees while I’m inside my own stomach I’m sure I don’t know. Psychotic abandonment can only go so far, and the image of my body still clings to my senses like a lost limb clings to an amputee, the empty space under his elbow continuing to itch and tingle and cramp years after its removal.

Oh dear, I’m not sure I like this dryness I’m seeing any longer. Could it be that I’m already dead, and that my vital juices are withdrawing outwards, seeping onto the carpet, or smuggling themselves out through my kidneys and into a dark stain on my jeans. When my grandmother died, I stood by while the paramedics explained to my mother how the body lets go of whatever it’s holding inside when it stops running. I watched a machine that had been working without rest for eight-five years wind down and shut off in the night without a sound, its final message to the world a small pool of urine, leaking out like the final receipt of a dying cash register.

I can’t look away from anything for a second in here. My own mind can absorb me so that I don’t see what I’m looking at – my eyes take in reality, but can’t push it along to my brain because there’s a tangle of thoughts blocking the way. The illuminated ceiling of my stomach is bubbling and blurring as I look up at it through ripples of clear liquid. Just a moment ago I was fine and now I’m sinking, and this time I don’t want to go any deeper than I already have. A minute ago I had legs. Do I still have lungs? I’m completely submerged now. Can I still drown if I’m inside my own body? I’d laugh at all this, but I’m beginning to burn all over now. What began as a pleasant warmth around my knees has now turned into a full-body fire of immense intensity. I’d try to tread water (“Move your arms in figure eights” my dad said.), but every part of me is frozen stiff by a horrible, throbbing pain that shoots in and out of me like a motorized knife, and now the light is going. This is worse than drowning. Oh god. So much worse. I’m drowning in pain and my mind is going blank and everything around is turning black and I’m so afraid and the fear is making the pain worse my God it’s like gasoline all over my burning body somebody help please.

Yes, yes, yes, yes the pain is leaving, oh thank you God yes. Another second more of it and I would have died. The sensation of the pain leaving is deeply wonderful, what I imagine heroin feels like, and I don’t want it to finish leaving. Imagine an agony that melts and melts and never stops melting – a state of eternal relief. That would be true heaven. Maybe I have died, and this is heaven, a soothing void where all the pain of your life never stops leaving you. When I was a child I had a rotting tooth with an exposed nerve, and the pain would make me cry. My dad used his finger to rub benzocaine onto in, and the onrush of numbness and sudden feeling of receding pain made me cry even harder. My dad looked at me with deep distress in his eyes as he held me and tried to comfort me, and I was too small to properly articulate that I was crying tears of joy. When my tooth stopped aching altogether, I became strangely sullen and retreated into my bedroom to read picture books alone, which distressed him even more. I wanted that initial feeling back. Thinking back on all this, I’m surprised I didn’t become a raging drug addict later in life.

Falling again. Nothing around me. A sensation of wind exaggerates the sense of falling to roller-coaster proportions, the way Disneyland blows air into your face to exaggerate the speed of the “Space Mountain” ride. Now I’m moving up and down, surging upwards into blackness with such speed that I’m bracing myself for a horrible, skull crushing impact against a ceiling that never arrives. Yanked downwards again. This time it’s less like falling than being tugged by my ankles, tied to a horse that’s galloping straight down the side of a cliff. In between being launched and dropped and dragged, there are sideways tumbles and diagonal lurches that are threatening to whiplash my brain into a useless, bloody hash. No pain comes with any of this, just feelings of sheer inertia lurching against my senses like a grand piano crashing around inside the hold of a rocking ship. Roll, roll, roll, tumble, roll, pitch, yaw, cannon shot out to the right, yanking slide down to the left. I can’t feel any of my body anymore, no knees, no head, no feet, and a void so deep and black and lightless it seems to have seeped inside and erased me like an ink stain moving across a page. No eyes. I somehow know that, where I’m going, I won’t need them. This knowledge comes from nowhere, because, like the landscape of a dream, it was simply waiting for me to arrive. I’m frightened again. Live without light long enough and your eyes will strain and adjust themselves until they give up and die, and you crawl through the darkness like a blind salamander forever, your bleached, featureless eyeballs staring out at nothing.

Our human fantasies of the afterlife, at least in the West, do not, cannot, permit any complexity of feeling. Introduce anything that suggests the kind of life we lead on Earth and we lose interest. Absolute heaven and absolute hell, total bliss and total agony are all we can conceive. All are fantasies born of a weariness, of a longing for release from the sliding floor of emotion we must sway and trip across, permanently unsure of our footing, for day upon day, year upon year, second upon oncoming second. Some are able to embrace this uncertainty, through the privilege of time or disaster, and are able to see the stumbling as a kind of stepless dance. But most of us in this country aren’t permitted the free time to develop a mindful soul, or the clarifying blast of a true crisis, like war, or famine, or imprisonment, that leaves us no choice but that or suicide. We hover in the tender space between these two extremes, shorn from our inner lives by alienated work and endless debt and worry, but with enough comfort to permit regret and rumination. We are wedged between two rocks, with just enough room to shrink our chest and breath in the poison, but not enough to expand and breath it out. We must hold it in and feel it burn inside us, suffering across generations from a kind of spiritual emphysema. Maybe this journey inside will finally allow me to expand to my full capacity, breath out everything clogging and dirty, and breath in everything wet, cleansed, and alive, like fragrant, freshly rinsed leaves after a nighttime rain, and yet…

All the breath is leaving me…all the breath has left me, as I feel the tumbling stop. I’m not still. There’s an inscrutable sense of motion all around me, but no indication of direction – the unpleasant, lurching feeling in the gut when you see a car backing out next to yours, and, for a split second, can’t tell if it’s yours sliding forward or theirs moving backwards. This point of comparison isn’t enough though. It’s from a topography of sense and orientation I know I’ve left behind forever. It is that feeling, yes, but spread around me a full 360 degrees, clamping me inside a sphere of pure acceleration. I think the hand of God is over me. I think I’m feeling him for the first time.

God isn’t the master of love. He doesn’t love the most, or the best. He is love. That’s something I was told incessantly as a little Catholic child. God is justice. God is power. God is goodness itself. Nonsense. That’s what I thought the moment I heard it. How can anybody be love, any more than someone can be the smell of coffee.

Now I understand with a true faith what it means, and what it means to fear God. I understand it with the unreasoned certainty of religion, which is coursing through me now like a terrible, rotten liquor. It is belief born from inside the gut. My inward sense of acceleration is building up and rolling down like a train, and it’s the agony of deep intoxication. God has given me tastes of this final moment before. We have all been secretly prepared for the moment we die.

A grand night out with friends, and I seem to be drunker than I’ve ever been in my life. I lean against the wall inside the bar bathroom for a few moments, the music outside thumping as if it will never end, but as soon as my eyes close, I start falling backward into the wall. It doesn’t brace me or slow my descent backwards, because it’s moving away from me as fast as I’m falling. I must open my eyes because the feeling is becoming unbearable. I have the terror of someone trapped inside a plummeting elevator, waiting for the floor to rush up and smash me into a sandwich. This is a special way of being afraid.

Faster and faster and faster. Heart beating fast enough to explode. Everything in me swollen with expectation. Falling, or flying upwards, moving somewhere so fast it defies language. There was a time when, if I fell in a dream I would wake up in my crib, see the guardian-angel figurine my parents had hung above my bedroom doorway, and sink back into a sweet, quilted sleep, repeating to myself the prayer I said with them every night before bed:

Angel of God, my guardian dear,

to whom God's love commits me here,

ever this day be at my side,

to light, to guard, to rule, to guide.

Amen.

But I’m not waking up, and there’s no guardian angel to help me slide peacefully into the wedge of light that’s appearing in front of me, and I’m so scared.

So cliché, moving into the light. Everyone fortunate enough to report their own demise speaks of it. What they all miss is the horrible solidness of the light. It’s something you would swerve to avoid instead of going through. The light has all the unstoppable weight and determination of a freight train, and it’s going to hit me. I’m trying to throw my weight on either side of me like a luge racer avoiding a sharp curve, but it isn’t working. Total powerlessness, total impotence, as I thrash about inside my own coffin. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, I’m doomed. The light is closer. The light is screeching. I’m glad to be getting out of this place. I’m scared to leave. The light is. The light is. The light IS.

* * *

Terrible day. I woke up this morning pasted to my bedroom floor, my head basting in a pool of my own spit. Panic overwhelmed me, and I immediately made an appointment over the phone with my doctor. I don’t remember anything from yesterday. Did I have stroke? A momentary respite came to me in the midst of that panic as I took in the extraordinary order of my bedroom. Apparently, before passing out, I’d managed to make my bed impeccably, clear the sloppy salad of papers from my nightstand, and clean the grime from my windows so completely that they shone the brightness of the morning sun as clearly as the God-given membrane of the human eye. It all made for a kind of clarity that is normally unwelcome to me, but that today indispensably anchored me as I retraced my steps back towards an ordered and admirable life.

As I left my bedroom, wiping away from my chin the last remnants of sleep, I had a beautiful feeling that everything was going my way. The couch was clean, the fridge was stocked, and the news alert on my phone tells me there’s a new vaccine available at my local supermarket. Who knew it would all happen this quickly? I’ve already reserved a slot, and I’m ready to walk the streets with the kind of biological impunity that was threatening to become a distant memory. Could this be what they call divine providence? If it is, then I will forever after be making way for the Lord in my life.

* * *

After my first dose of the vaccine, I took what seemed like an impossibly long drive out to my girlfriend’s place. Her apartment was in a state of absolute squalor. Everything had been deposited along the walls and over the floor as senselessly as a river heaps silt along its banks. Helping her clean up and put things in their place was so sweet, like I was pushing my small corner of the world into the future, in defiance of the upheaval that has overtaken everyone, and when we finished, we looked out over our work as proudly as new parents, and inaugurated the occasion by fucking like it was going out of style. It was a moment of pure animal weakness, which precludes any of the sanitized, fake descriptions of sex that have been coined throughout the years. No “making love” or “cleaving to one another.” In the heat of the moment, all sex is fucking.

* * *

Several weeks ago it felt like the pandemic entered into history, instantly forming an impenetrable crust of knowing recollection, becoming the crisis we all saw coming and that we all learned from. The full force of it came to me in my girlfriend’s shower. A feeling of undeserved luxury encompasses you inside an unfamiliar shower. The water is always warmer, better distributed across your body, more satisfying in its flow, than the one you have at home. It was this satisfaction that helped me reflect on the days passed over, the fears overcome, and the habits conquered throughout this period of adversity. Pride overwhelmed me as I watched the water jet off of my head and down into the drain.

* * *

Yesterday I returned to work, and seeing my coworkers was as thrilling as seeing friends on the first day of a new semester in high school. Work continued on as usual, and the day ended with everything in its place, every problem solved, every objection anticipated and answered. Driving home was a satisfying journey towards a well-earned rest. A drink and a smoke on the balcony and I was ready for bed. No dreams, only rest.

* * *

Today, in the shower, I washed dirt out of my hair. I don’t know where it came from, and I feel the remnants of something clinging to my head like an old hat. I’m scared, and I don’t know why.