What happens. I drive to the store. Read in a coffeeshop. Pretend to work. The drama having subsided, the sad affair, the hero dies, a little heroically, the other left alone. How to end it. Had a small success. Child married off. Buy new car and spend time in the car and go to Italy with wife for two weeks. Honored at retirement with new watch. I admire the watch, alone, later, shake it to get it going, set the date first, to the day before today, then wind the minute hand around and around, maybe twelve hours but twenty-four hours if necessary, to reach the next day. To see the time pass like that, comically fast, or even a little terrifying actually, you laugh and you cry, he used to say. I sit in the car. I wind it backward an hour, then wildly in reverse. I take the watch off abruptly because it burned my wrist.
I go over to a vision world. Involuntarily. Color palette: grey. More like grey-blue. A river, rushing, maybe forty feet across, tangled branches and dead wood on the banks, scattered but otherwise clear. Mud on the banks, the banks made of mud. Rained a lot recently but not raining now. Water in the river is grey-green with some flashes of white where little river waves collapse over themselves. I am wearing the suit and tie I wore to his funeral with an unzipped windbreaker over the top of the jacket, hair flying back in the wind, getting anxious. Looking to the other side. I am pacing the bank, watching my step, slide a little, eyes fixed across the river. Muddy river, with waves. I screamed out, voice breaking, his name. I scream it again, through tears. Sounds like: voices recorded saying the words backward, then backmasked. Play with the subtitles on to understand. Now I can see the whole scene as though a bird would see it, from above, the grey-green river in the middle, a divide, he is on the other side, yes I now realize he is there on the other side. Now we see him, close up, face, crying, frantic, and he screams my name back to me, then another thing I cannot hear, and he goes down to knees in the mud, rain picking up. He makes a vague gesture, as if hoping for something impossible. He stops moving. Now just staring back from the other side of the river, he makes a gesture with right hand, an ancient sign of teaching. Rest. Benediction. Admonition. A message from the dead in the other world. We cannot understand it. We look at each other, our expressions match. He looks like he is about to say something then stops. Cut abruptly to black. Only I can see this from here in the car. He died a long time ago but there we were. Everything felt so real.
I wondered: Where does a thought like this come from? Who is this person who knows me so well, who could hurt me so much, to show me something like this from inside of my own self?
Brian Doak is an author of fiction and nonfiction who lives near Portland, Oregon. Other recent work has appeared in Hard Pack magazine and the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture.
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