Chapter Two - Into the Light
Stop, get this boulder off my chest. It's crushing me, splitting my ribs, and I can't breathe. My heart's ripping apart; something's tearing and flooding my chest with blood, choking me. I'm so frightened. Where is Meg? Where is she? I can't feel her arms anymore in the black. I can't move under this weight. Oh, this is worse than the last time, much worse. Something's being pulled out of my chest, long and snaky and full of pain.
I'm being split in two. Where is Meg? Where is her hand around my neck, to hold me down, to keep me here? My blindness was not so black as this. When the sun was on my face a little light came through, and I lived in a haze of grey, sometimes even seeing her shadow.
But this is black, and worse than black. Oh, my love, where is your hand?
There. How did my head come to rest in a lap? I was paralyzed, but now I can make little movements. Cool hands slide over my face, like sun in the winter. Soft like a little bird's, and a voice sings to me. It's sweet, and lifts me up. But where did Meg learn to sing like that? She always said she sounded like a crow when she sang, and I never told her, but she did. Not that it mattered. Meg's arms and her hands on my body sang to me. However, these hands that stroke my brow and lift the pressure off my screaming chest bit by bit aren't hers.
There, two hands, no, four. I go so deeply into black that I go beyond it and out the other side. Oh, hands of love, don't leave me, and though I struggle, Meg's hands are gone, slipped away into the other side of black. I don't know whose hands these others are, but they soothe and calm me. Meg's hands vanish, and now two others are here, hands made entirely of dark. Now my head is in a new lap, cradled in the circle of new arms, and a sweetness like none other in my life fills me.
I should feel terror at this abyss beyond sense, this non-sense where I sit rocked in tender arms. It's like travelling but I don't move. I reach for that light and senseless hand and there it is, lying on my face, on that side at which I never could really look, even after the decades when Meg watered it with tears and kisses and brushed it with her beautiful hair. But this hand isn't Meg's hand. The wrist is wrapped in a dark sleeve like a man's coat, even though the wrist is delicate and the hand feminine.
This new hand on my face keeps me from convulsing in terror. I'm seeing a hand. I'm seeing again. I haven't seen in five years. The light gradually dimmed and faded over that time to flickering grey, but this hand looks more real than a hand ever has. I turn around and I can move, it's amazing. The weight is gone, I can move. I turn and look at her and everything stops.
Her face is old and lined like mine, but shining like a coin in the sun. Pulled back into a severe bun, her hair shines like light itself. Do I know her? Her hands on me seem familiar and I've felt that look covering me, watching with me. Watching over me.
"Who are you?" I ask.
She gives me a look of pure compassion, the one I've been searching for all my life. Meg's tenderness came the closest, but was still nothing like the expression on this stern woman's face. I start to cry but no tears come.
Everywhere I searched for that look - from my mother who roughly pushed me away, or from my father who gave me a few beatings and then was gone. As a prisoner of the circus, I would scan the crowd looking for one face, any face, anyone who would look at me with anything but fascination or disgust. I thought I saw it in Christine's face, but compassion is neither desire nor pity.
Her look pours over me. "Who are you?" I repeat.
"Gariela. I know you. Soon you'll recognize me."
"Where am I?"
"In between worlds," she answers.
I don't hear her voice. Instead, I feel it through me like a musical note, the purest note there is. No fuzz, no vibration, no catching of the breath or hoarseness of the voice. Just pure tones that make me shake with their beauty.
"Don't let me go," I whimper. "I'm afraid."
"I'm here. When you're ready to see, you'll see."
"Don't let me go, please. Something has happened. I thought I'd die with the pain - my chest was bursting - but now it's gone. I couldn't see but now I see you, but nothing else."
"I know. Don't be afraid. I'm here."
So I nestle back in her lap, and as she rests her hand on my hair I'm a little boy in the lap of his mother. I never remembered that from life, but now it enters me - not memory, exactly - but experience. As if I were a glass, and experience were being poured into me. I know what it's like to be held and nursed, the warm breast in my mouth, the tickle of hands on my feet, the soft rubbing of oil onto baby skin. The mouth on my stomach cooing, little boy, sweet little love.
There were hands, and I can vaguely recall them now, hands that did tend me gently, but not my mother's. Thank you, I say to those long-vanished hands. Of course there had to be hands like that. I see that now. How would I have lived otherwise?
"Oh, my poor mother. Did you know her, Gariela?"
"I did, and do."
"I can't hate her anymore."
"No, you can't."
"Rock me. Rock me, as she would have."
Then she does, and I think that no pleasure that I have ever known could come close.
I try to close my eyes but an image comes into focus like a grainy picture developing before my sight. I see Meg holding me in our bed, tears leaking out of her wrinkled eyes. She looks so much older than when I saw her last, but her arms are still so beautiful. Why are you holding that old, dry thing, that rag doll of a man? I want to ask her, and then I know.
I know.
"I've died, haven't I?"
"Yes," Gariela says.
"She can't come with me, can she?"
"We will bring her later. But not just yet."
"I want to say good-bye."
"Breathe on her, then."
My chest works again, and as I breathe out, something bright swirls out of my mouth and around her beloved head like a cloud. She turns her head blindly toward the window and rubs her face. She thinks it's the sun or the wind. She feels me on the breeze but can't see me. Lightly she rubs her cheek, as if I'd just kissed it.
A terrible understanding dawns in my breast - this is how a ghost is born. I pretended for so many years to be a ghost, but now a frightening choice appears before me. Gariela's silver eyes are on me, burning in that face scarred with deep little cuts. I could live here as a ghost if I wanted to. I could haunt the house, move the furniture, and whisper in the corners at night until I faded away into a gibbering idiocy.
Gariela sits, waiting. She has an eternity to wait.
"It's over, isn't it?" I say, finally. "Forty-nine years ago, I walked through one portal and never looked back. I never expected to see Meg there at the end of that corridor, but there she was, and she has been the sun shining on me ever since. It's like that again, isn't it? It's over for me here."
"Yes. A new portal, a new path, a new sun."
"I've been a ghost. It's overrated. Take me, Gariela."
The room fades and Meg's sad face with it. The last gesture I see is her veined and spotted hand moving over my face, fully closing my sightless eyes. Then something blows all around me like a great rustling, and Gariela's hands are on mine once again. Her long black coat ripples in an unseen wind and that's not her hair, it's a corona of light I see all around her. Suddenly I'm afraid again.
"I've done some evil things. Shameful things," I tell her.
"I know everything you've done. I have been with you since before your birth."
"It was you, wasn't it? That night, when I brought Christine down to the cave. You were holding her head when I … Oh, God, help me. You were there. You saw everything."
Then I sit very quietly in the space in between the light and the dark. A dream will fade as the day goes on, but this is the opposite of a dream, for what I recall becomes clearer, like a picture coming into focus. Again I hear Gariela's voice telling me that it wouldn't help, as I played with myself like an adolescent in the dark. Again I feel Gariela's silver tears on my cheek when I cried myself to sleep.
She waits, and there's no place to hide from her tenderness.
"There's no need for shame," she tells me. "Sorrow, yes. Remorse. But not shame."
"There is blood on my hands that won't wash off. There is filth, and lust, and cowardice. Lies, so many lies."
"Yes. But all blood washes off if you first wash your heart. Walk with me," she says, and she holds out her hand to mine.
It hangs there in the air between us. I recognize the gesture. Once I held my hand out like that to a girl, and when she took it everything changed. Had I known how, would I have still held out my hand like that, taken hers in mine and walked down that path?
Yes, I would have.
Gariela stands there waiting, and while her hands had guided me through the doorway of dying, this I know will be different. The temptation to remain a ghost comes over me again, this time stronger. At least I know what being a ghost means. I could stay in our house and see Meg for a few more years until she died. But what would come to me from Gariela's hand, that as I look on it grows brighter and hotter?
"Where am I going?" I ask. "What's going to become of me?"
"You trust me, or you don't. You face your fate, or you don't."
Her hand, waiting.
If I go into the fire, I think, I go in with my eyes open. I don't deserve mercy. But I would like it, even though I gave far too little. Suddenly a great weariness comes over me. I'm tired, tired of the struggle. I just want to rest on my mother's lap and hear her tell me that it's all right. Just once.
"Take me to the fire, Gariela," I say, "or take me to my mother. I can't fight this anymore. Here is my hand, here's everything. I give up. It's really over now."
I put my hand in hers.
A fierce knowledge goes through me. The life leaves the body slowly. I've been caught in the spiderweb of time up till now, as my flesh cooled and faded. But the cord has been pulled and the web lifted. The life of my body is gone, truly gone.
Around Gariela a blinding aperture of light opens, and we go through it together.
(continued…)