The Video Message - part two

After they had recorded the video, and had spoken again with Dr. Saars-Tomlin, and returned home; and after she had dropped Araceli off at her soccer practice – where the other girls, and the coaches, still grew solemn when they saw her, even now, months later; she hoped that would end, eventually, and not continue throughout her childhood – Jennifer sat down at their dining room table, before the picture window that looked onto the backyard.

She thought about adding a coda, with just her, not Araceli, to the recorded message:

“Perry, my love. My love. Among everything else going on – losing you, helping Araceli, parenting by myself . . . I wonder. I wonder if we were cruel to put you in that thing. If I was cruel. Everyone else – Bill and Connie; the doctor – the doctors, all of them; and Ara, of course – think it was the right thing. That you may come back. But.”

She stared out the window into the back yard. She was speaking aloud.

“But what if this was cruel. It was me, all up to me. I could have said no. And you may be in that thing for . . . who knows. Who knows how long. If what Saars-Tomlin says is true, who knows when someone might pull you out of it. If they ever do. Or if you ever do manage to heal in there on your own. Maybe I was wrong. Should I just have let you go. Should I just have let you go.”

She wrung her hands together; pulled them apart; made fists.

“And what if you are dreaming in there. What if you need to pull out of a nightmare, and you can’t. Oh my god. I hope, I so hope you are gone until you’re back.”

This story to be continued

Drift

Araceli was before me in a mist, a blurred vision, perhaps close enough to touch; and then gone, again. I had reached out toward her during that moment, like waving my hand into fog, hoping to touch her, but once again there had been nothing. I could not tell if she had been too far away, or if her form had been only an illusion. It struck me how pathetic my hope was: I hoped not that we meet, nor that we might speak; not even that she was seeing me—it seemed she was meeting my eyes with hers, but I could not be sure—but rather that she was really there. I dreamed and hoped she was present in that haze, lost in that dimension, and not just a vision or an echo. My daughter lost in a fissure between realities seemed the best I could wish for.

She looked like she had the last time I had been together with her. Or was it the last time? Ten years old, her hair in a bandanna, thin tan legs below white shorts. She was not appearing as a five-year-old all in pink, nor a toddler keeping one hand out in case she needed to reach me; in other words, she was not appearing as I sometimes remembered her. She was not the four-year-old in the sun-soaked memory on our sidewalk on the summer day when we had put out a wide roll of paper, and puddles of paint, and let her make a Pollock with her bare feet. Nor was she the six-year-old in pink—yes, there had been many pink shirts and dresses in her early childhood—taking off from me on her first bike ride, in her huge helmet, wobbling away while she left my reach. These were memories always in my mind; but I saw her now at ten years old. This had been her age when we had such a thing as time, such a thing as months. This gave me hope. I thought it made it more likely that my visions of her were real, not dreams or addled hallucinations.

I stepped back into the room. A hardwood floor, this time, with high ceilings and tall windows covered by thick green drapes. I did not bother pulling the drapes to look out. I knew it would be only the milky white nothing, like clouds seen through the window of an airplane.

I sat down on the floor. In this space there was no furniture; no chairs or anything else. I lay down, and at some point slept.It was difficult to tell the difference between sleep and the mindless waiting.

And then I drifted, again. I felt off balance, and then surrounded by fog. And then, though seeing nothing, I heard her voice:

“Daddy.”

This was the first thing I had heard from her since the fall. It was from far off, with a bare echo. It was nearly tangible, for me. Her lovely voice, musical and clear.

There had been virtually no baby talk for Ara; once she had started speaking, it had been in a bell-clear voice with something to say.

And then I tumbled back into light, and then onward into the dark room. But it was a darkness that was a real darkness, and not just a void. This was reassuring. Again, it was striking now what simple things gave me hope. Darkness was clearly better than void.

I thought of her voice; I held it. It filled my ears, still. I did not need to eat, any longer, in these places; and I had no occasion to talk; but I could still hear. I could hear Ara. Her voice stayed with me.

*

What had I been doing when the world ran out? Ran out; that’s what it seemed to me had happened. The grains of sand of reality falling through the hourglass of our universe had run out. That seemed to explain this disaster. Had it happened just to me and Araceli, or to everyone? Whatever the answer, it seemed there was a pause in the universe, or in our piece of it.

And maddeningly, I could not remember the moment when I had begun to drift. Perhaps I was worried on a train, or speaking on a cradled phone while reading an email on a screen. Maybe it was my lack of attention to any particular action that had made all of them fade out. It was because of this gap in my memory that I suspected the pause was my fault. Since the only human I ever saw now was my daughter, the one I was bound to care for; and because I had failed her like no other human had ever failed a daughter before, I blamed myself. It must have been my lack of attention. I must have missed something.

What had I ignored? The fact that I could not remember my final actions was damning. My lapse had pushed my daughter off an edge, and perhaps the rest of the world with her.

I had tried to put this out of my mind, this searching for a final memory of the old world. But this was difficult with so much monotony, now, and nothing to do.

There was more clarity in my mind about my wife. Whenever this disaster had happened, Jen had been away. I remembered that much. We had parted as always; I think it had been in a morning. She had likely been in her office, or traveling that day, when everything stopped.

She might be alone, now, drifting through her own cracks in reality. Or perhaps she was along with us, right behind us—or before us—in the fog. But I saw only Ara. Once a week, perhaps once a day—only when these shifts occurred, but not at each of them—I would see her as a faded presence. She would seem to fall toward me through the air, but never close enough; and then she would be gone.

Araceli. I remembered holding her for hours when she was a baby, smelling her hair. I remembered her falling asleep in my arms, her fine arching eyebrows turned toward my shirt. I remembered carrying her in a backpack as I walked errands, talking to her over my shoulder. I had spent so much time with her, and worked so hard to check all the right boxes; providing what she needed and holding back what she didn’t. But it had not been enough.

The dark room was the quietest. All the others had some sort of ambient sound, white noise. But in this one I could hear my heart beat, and the stretching of my lungs. I wondered that my heart still needed to beat, and my lungs breathe, now that time was over. But they did.

If my heart beat, and my lungs breathed, then there had to be some energy to make them do so. But there was no hunger, in this place. No food, and no need for it. Perhaps causes and effects had vanished, along with time, and rational space, and so the heart and lungs were free to work at no cost, forever.

I sat and thought. Eventually I closed my eyes. I dreamed of ice cream with Ara and Jen, the three of us at a white table, long before the drift. Jen had been laughing, and Ara raising herself up on her knees to better dive into her bowl with her spoon. Jen was present only in these dreams, now; I had no glimpses of her.

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*

After one particular shift back into the room with hardwood floors, a fall in which I had not seen anything of Ara, I heard something. It came from what might be called the rear of the room.

What was at the rear of the rooms? Nothing. Their walls extended back a few feet and disappeared into a blur. Or not even a blur; they were just not there anymore. If I tried to walk out the back of the room, I was stopped by a resistance without pressure. It was not quicksand, not a web, but I could not move. Perhaps it was only gravity—a wall in which gravity pooled and stopped me from exiting.

But this room had something in back, something beyond the disappearance. I heard sounds, something like far-away voices. They may have spoken a different language. It may even have been the lowing of animals. It was maddeningly faint, but there.

When I slept in that room I was heartened by these barely perceptible sounds. Perhaps I was stranded inside a prison, but there was an outside. At least in this room, at this moment. And if this was a moment, there would be other moments.

I despaired about what Ara was thinking about me. I could only assume that she was seeing glimpses of me, just as I was of her, and probably wondering if she herself had done something wrong. It felt likely to me that she was blaming herself for failing to learn something; failing to pay attention to an alarm bell or an error message that had led to this. I had to assume she was walking in her own spare rooms, building anxious pressure in her head as she tried to remember what the adults had told her about this lapse, this slip.

I was pulled backward, out of the room, as if I were immersed in a dry undertow. I felt my arms rise up from my body as I fell.

Then Ara was before me. She was achingly, infuriatingly close. She had to be in reach. I put out my hand, trying to touch her, but it was as if I was lowering a stick into water, tricked by refraction. There was nothing. She was in white, right before me, her brown eyes seeking mine, but I could do nothing.

Again she spoke:

“Daddy. I left you”

-were the words. My heart surged, and then sank: so this was a dream, and she was simply telling me what my brain knew: She was gone. She had left me.

I fell backward, and kept falling.

But I was wrong about her sentence. I fell back into a bright room, a room with a long table. It was not quite a normal table, for it grew out of the wall; but it had legs, and it was the right height, and had a chair before it, so it was good enough.

And on it was a paper. It was a note from Ara. “I left you a letter;” that’s what she had been saying.

Her writing was print, of course, not cursive. I wondered if she felt self-conscious about her printing. I had always given her a hard time about it, joking but serious too. Schools barely taught cursive writing anymore, only a few months of it in the third grade. That had been the previous year, for her, and she had soon reverted to printing. I would shake my head at the sticks and curves of her wind-blown writing. I would show her the letters we received from her grandmother, all composed in beautiful cursive. I had teased her—I now hope she took it only as teasing—that her printing looked like a patch of dandelions and candy canes.

It was that printing I read now:

Daddy,

I found a pencil. I will try to leave it for you. There were many other things, too, when I was here, in the back of this room.

I can see you, but I can’t hear you. I don’t know what happened. I haven’t seen Mommy. Or anyone else.

I think we are going in and out of the same rooms, in turns. I saw your footprints in dust in one room.

Tell me if you know how to make this stop. I don’t know what to do.

I love you

Araceli

Again my heart surged, but with hope, this time—real hope. I stood and looked behind me, still holding the letter (which I would never let go). This room was long, as long as a hallway, and far down it there were more furnishings, more objects. I could move toward it, this time, and I did.

It was a classroom. Not precisely one I had ever seen, neither mine nor one of hers; but a classroom, with desks, books, and papers. Pencils and a smartboard and a teacher’s desk.

The books in this room had no printing, no titles, and the desks were misshapen and stuck to the floor, but I found paper and pencils. I wrote back to her, and left the letter on that same table.

Araceli,

I am glad you checked this room and discovered this.

You are very brave. I don’t understand what has happened, either.

I told her that this seemed to be getting better. This seemed ridiculous, based as it was on just this half-formed room and a few sounds I had heard, but I could not get away from my perceived paternal duty to be hopeful and to try to show that there was some sort of order in the world.

I told her I would keep reaching for her.

The next shift happened while I was writing. I was pulled out of the chair, or the chair was pulled away from me, and I saw the pencil fall onto the letter.

She appeared before me again. This time I saw her in profile as I was blown away. She was a blur, and despite her calm letter to me she looked frightened.

What had gone wrong? It was most likely, I thought, that nothing had gone wrong, that this was just the nature of our universe. We had now learned that the laws of time and space—and gravity—in our universe could change instantly. It had been presumptuous of us to think otherwise. I have read that physicists have been reaching a consensus that there are likely an infinite number of universes. Why should we be living in one that does not change? Who could point to any guarantee that this unlikely tower of balanced stones that allows rational life would never topple over?

Perhaps our collective consciousness had had something to do with the stability. Perhaps the energy of our minds was a glue that kept reality bound by natural laws, and when too many of us removed ourselves, the universe became unmoored just like a ship slipping away from its anchor. But this was foolish anthropocentrism; the planet had evidently been governed by a consistent physics for billions of years before our arrival. No, I believed that this particular universe had simply ended its run of predictability. The sand had run out. But perhaps it would trickle back. Or perhaps the hourglass would flip and start again.

The next shift was to the dark room, with no sign of Ara and nothing from her waiting for me there. I looked for dust on the floor of the room, anything she might have disturbed, but there was nothing. She was teaching me, with this. It had not occurred to me to look for a sign of her in these rooms the way she must have done for me.

*

I do not know if I was asleep or awake when I relived a moment I had had with Jen. We had just met, and we were sitting next to each other in the back of a friend’s car. There were three of us, back there, across that seat, with the windows down, and as the wind blew in, it threw some of her hair into my face.

“Sorry,” she said, with a smile. She pulled back her hair. We were young, and close, and her hair was brushing me on a balmy, sun-washed day. She did not have to apologize.

*

I awoke back in the classroom. It was more developed, this time. The main table was free from the wall, and some of the books in the rear were real. There was a dictionary, and a stack of French textbooks.

I thought of the new vocabulary I was inventing, as the days—or lack of days—slid past: Rooms were developed, or not. Shifts took me from place to place. During those shifts, I would drift. I hoped that at some time I would be able to speak to Ara, to Jen, to others, and settle on terms.

In the rear of the classroom, one desk stood apart from the others. On it was another letter, and a book.

Daddy,

I saw you from a distance, the last time we moved. I saw you move away like you were in water.

I still have not seen anyone else.

I hope you are not hungry. I have never seen any food. I have not been hungry.

I hope this ends soon.

I got your letter. I wish I knew what was happening.

Love

Araceli

The book on the desk, beneath the letter, was a bird guide; a Peterson guide. Ara knew that I had a copy of this book, or had had a copy, always in reach on a windowsill by the dining room table. Now she had found it here and left it for me.

I opened the book to a page of accidental seabirds; birds out of their range. Ara was familiar with these. Perhaps we were now accidental, ourselves. It was the best I could find to hope for. I turned the book upside down, open to that page, and left it there for her.

*

At the next shift I saw her for a minute, or more, and we came very close. It seemed to last an hour. It was a miracle, for me. I was with Ara, or almost with her.

We faced each other in air that was not clear but not the cloud-like fog, either; it was just nothing. But we were close.

Ara smiled. She mouthed “Daddy,” and I could not hear her, but she was within reach.

And then we touched hands. Fingertips to fingertips, we touched. Her hand was warm. I could not reach out far enough to grasp her, but we had touched, and we were getting closer every time. I hoped, I believed, now, that the sand was filling back into the hourglass.