Atlantis

1. FAITH “I’ve been having these awful dreams, each a little different, though the core’s the same— we’re walking in a field, Wally and Arden and I, a stretch of grass with a highway running beside it, or a path in the woods that opens onto a road. Everything’s fine, then the dog sprints ahead of us, excited; we’re calling but he’s racing down a scent and doesn’t hear us, and that’s when he goes onto the highway. I don’t want to describe it. Sometimes it’s brutal and over, and others he’s struck and takes off so we don’t know where he is or how bad. This wakes me every night now, and I stay awake; I’m afraid if I sleep I’ll go back into the dream. It’s been six months, almost exactly, since the doctor wrote not even a real word but an acronym, a vacant four-letter cipher that draws meanings into itself, reconstitutes the world. We tried to say it was just a word; we tried to admit it had power and thus to nullify it by means of our acknowledgement. I know the current wisdom: bright hope, the power of wishing you’re well. He’s just so tired, though nothing shows in any tests, Nothing, the doctor says, detectable; the doctor doesn’t hear what I do, that trickling, steadily rising nothing that makes him sleep all day, vanish into fever’s tranced afternoons, and I swear sometimes when I put my head to his chest I can hear the virus humming like a refrigerator. Which is what makes me think you can take your positive attitude and go straight to hell. We don’t have a future, we have a dog. Who is he? Soul without speech, sheer, tireless faith, he is that-which-goes-forward, black muzzle, black paws scouting what’s ahead; he is where we’ll be hit first, he’s the part of us that’s going to get it. I’m hardly awake on our morning walk —always just me and Arden now— and sometimes I am still in the thrall of the dream, which is why, when he took a step onto Commercial before I’d looked both ways, I screamed his name and grabbed his collar. And there I was on my knees, both arms around his neck and nothing coming, and when I looked into that bewildered face I realized I didn’t know what it was I was shouting at, I didn’t know who I was trying to protect.” 2. REPRIEVE I woke in the night and thought, It was a dream, nothing has torn the future apart, we have not lived years in dread, it never happened, I dreamed it all. And then there was this sensation of terrific pressure lifting, as if I were rising in one of those old diving bells, lightening, unburdening. I didn’t know how heavy my life had become—so much fear, so little knowledge. It was like being young again, but I understood how light I was, how without encumbrance,— and so I felt both young and awake, which I never felt when I was young. The curtains moved —it was still summer, all the windows open— and I thought, I can move that easily. I thought my dream had lasted for years, a decade, a dream can seem like that, I thought, There’s so much more time ... And then of course the truth came floating back to me. You know how children love to end stories they tell by saying, It was all a dream? Years ago, when I taught kids to write, I used to tell them this ending spoiled things, explaining and dismissing what had come before. Now I know how wise they were, to prefer that gesture of closure, their stories rounded not with a sleep but a waking. What other gift comes close to a reprieve? This was the dream that Wally told me: I was in the tunnel, he said, and there really was a light at the end, and a great being standing in the light. His arms were full of people, men and women, but his proportions were all just right—I mean he was the size of you or me. And the people said, Come with us, we’re going dancing. And they seemed so glad to be going, and so glad to have me join them, but I said, I’m not ready yet. I didn’t know what to do, when he finished, except hold the relentless weight of him, I didn’t know what to say except, It was a dream, nothing’s wrong now, it was only a dream. 3. MICHAEL’S DREAM Michael writes to tell me his dream: I was helping Randy out of bed, supporting him on one side with another friend on the other, and as we stood him up, he stepped out of the body I was holding and became a shining body, brilliant light held in the form I first knew him in. This is what I imagine will happen, the spirit’s release. Michael, when we support our friends, one of us on either side, our arms under the man or woman’s arms, what is it we’re holding? Vessel, shadow, hurrying light? All those years I made love to a man without thinking how little his body had to do with me; now, diminished, he’s never been so plainly himself—remote and unguarded, an otherness I can’t know the first thing about. I said, You need to drink more water or you’re going to turn into an old dry leaf. And he said, Maybe I want to be an old leaf. In the dream Randy’s leaping into the future, and still here; Michael’s holding him and releasing at once. Just as Steve’s holding Jerry, though he’s already gone, Marie holding John, gone, Maggie holding her John, gone, Carlos and Darren holding another Michael, gone, and I’m holding Wally, who’s going. Where isn’t the question, though we think it is; we don’t even know where the living are, in this raddled and unraveling “here.” What is the body? Rain on a window, a clear movement over whose gaze? Husk, leaf, little boat of paper and wood to mark the speed of the stream? Randy and Jerry, Michael and Wally and John: lucky we don’t have to know what something is in order to hold it. 4. ATLANTIS I thought your illness a kind of solvent dissolving the future a little at a time; I didn’t understand what’s to come was always just a glimmer up ahead, veiled like the marsh gone under its tidal sheet of mildly rippling aluminum. What these salt distances were is also where they’re going: from blankly silvered span toward specificity: the curve of certain brave islands of grass, temporary shoulder-wide rivers where herons ply their twin trades of study and desire. I’ve seen two white emissaries unfold like heaven’s linen, untouched, enormous, a fluid exhalation. Early spring, too cold yet for green, too early for the tumble and wrack of last season to be anything but promise, but there in the air was white tulip, marvel, triumph of all flowering, the soul lifted up, if we could still believe in the soul, after so much diminishment ... Breath, from the unpromising waters, up, across the pond and the two-lane highway, pure purpose, over the dune, gone. Tomorrow’s unreadable as this shining acreage; the future’s nothing but this moment’s gleaming rim. Now the tide’s begun its clockwork turn, pouring, in the day’s hourglass, toward the other side of the world, and our dependable marsh reappears —emptied of that starched and angular grace that spirited the ether, lessened, but here. And our ongoingness, what there’ll be of us? Look, love, the lost world rising from the waters again: our continent, where it always was, emerging from the half-light, unforgettable, drenched, unchanged. 5. COASTAL Cold April and the neighbor girl —our plumber’s daughter— comes up the wet street from the harbor carrying, in a nest she’s made of her pink parka, a loon. It’s so sick, she says when I ask. Foolish kid, does she think she can keep this emissary of air? Is it trust or illness that allows the head —sleek tulip—to bow on its bent stem across her arm? Look at the steady, quiet eye. She is carrying the bird back from indifference, from the coast of whatever rearrangement the elements intend, and the loon allows her. She is going to call the Center for Coastal Studies, and will swaddle the bird in her petal-bright coat until they come. She cradles the wild form. Stubborn girl. 6. NEW DOG Jimi and Tony can’t keep Dino, their cocker spaniel; Tony’s too sick, the daily walks more pressure than pleasure, one more obligation that can’t be met. And though we already have a dog, Wally wants to adopt, wants something small and golden to sleep next to him and lick his face. He’s paralyzed now from the waist down, whatever’s ruining him moving upward, and we don’t know how much longer he’ll be able to pet a dog. How many men want another attachment, just as they’re leaving the world? Wally sits up nights and says, I’d like some lizards, a talking bird, some fish. A little rat. So after I drive to Jimi and Tony’s in the Village and they meet me at the door and say, We can’t go through with it, we can’t give up our dog, I drive to the shelter —just to look—and there is Beau: bounding and practically boundless, one brass concatenation of tongue and tail, unmediated energy, too big, wild, perfect. He not only licks Wally’s face but bathes every irreplaceable inch of his head, and though Wally can no longer feed himself he can lift his hand, and bring it to rest on the rough gilt flanks when they are, for a moment, still. I have never seen a touch so deliberate. It isn’t about grasping; the hand itself seems almost blurred now, softened, though tentative only because so much will must be summoned, such attention brought to the work—which is all he is now, this gesture toward the restless splendor, the unruly, the golden, the animal, the new.