TOWARD A DARKLING PLAIN

by Irving A Greenfield

He screamed and banged on the closet door, but his mother held it shut. She fought him and won. Being in the closet was his punishment for her having had to answer to his teacher for his bad behavior, his lack of interest and worse, his rudeness.

“I’ll be good,” he cried. “I promise.” He was afraid of the dark. The dark was where the Igdigs lived, and he was terrified they would get him…

That voice, grown tiny and faint over the years, never left Paul; and now it seemed to grow louder, occupying more space in his head with each argument he had with Cynthia, his wife. Both of them were in the closet, but only he knew he was. This time, he couldn’t kick and scream until his mother would open the door. This time, there wasn’t any door to kick or bang on; and everyone in his family was dead: mother, father, and three older sisters.

An octogenarian, he was the sole survivor. In his present circumstances, the benefits for surviving were few, while the detriments were many. Being in the closet was one of them; his infirmities were the other. Crushingly, it narrowed his world, preventing him from having the experiences he wanted to have. But all of that was endurable.

It was the closet that was unendurable, and yet he endured. There wasn’t any way for him to escape, except by dying; and though he thought about suicide, he wasn’t ready for it yet.

Cynthia stood in the way. Who would take care of her? Not their sons, who had their own burdens; or her younger brother, who would probably not be able to admit that his sister had Alzheimer’s or dementia, or possibly both. He had difficulty admitting it; and it was there, palpable every day. It was the closet in which both of them now lived. The Igdigs morphed into real fears, anger and guilt; resentment and depression coupled to a deep feeling of impotence.

Had he somehow failed her? Was he failing her now?

She made impossible demands, things he could no longer do, or that he was powerless to do. And when he told her he couldn’t do what she asked, she reacted negatively, either with the sulks; or more recently, with anger, an irrational fury goading him into an angry response and the emotional abyss that followed it.

After their last blow up, he died or something died inside of him. He was broken, and he knew it. He left the apartment, but she came after him.

“I came from nothing, and I’ll go back to nothing,” he told her. “You can have it all.”

She pleaded with him not to go.

There wasn’t any place for him to go to other than a hotel room. But after a few nights, where? He didn’t know, and didn’t care. Silently, he shook his head. This was the payoff for all the years of being married to her. Maybe she felt the same way. But he never asked her to do something she couldn’t possibly do.

“Come back inside,” she said.

“Why?” He didn’t let her answer. “For more of the same,” he challenged.

“We can talk.”

“I don’t want to talk. We said more than enough to each other.”

“Come,” she said, extending her hand to him.

“You pushed me over the line,” he told her, taking hold of her hand. He saw the fear in her face, in her eyes, and let her lead him back into the apartment.

#

Later, he couldn’t sleep and went into the living room. He stood at the window that framed the harbor with its patchwork of lights that broke up darkness. Their past trickled through his mind. Tears blurred his vision. He took a step backward and sat in the high back chair adjacent to the window. What happened between them was beyond being sad. It augured for a lessening of her hold on reality and more forbearance from him. No longer could there be any sort of a dividing line between what he would or would not tolerate.

As if he were denying his thoughts, he shook his head. But he wasn’t denying them; he accepted the personal enormity of them with feelings of amazement and disbelief at what he saw as their future.

The trickle of the past suddenly became white-water, swift and dangerous, full of boulders. Lightning bolts of misdeeds stretching farther back than his memory of them could go.

“Yes. Yes, I’m guilty. Mea maxima culpa. And you, what did you do or didn’t do?”

But now, in the deep quietness of the night, there wasn’t answer, only the recognition that there never should have been a question. Her vision of the past was as mist-ridden as her vision of the present. What he clearly saw was their anguish, their decrepitude and their different realities that like Venn diagrams overlapped in a narrow arc of their circularity.

He dozed, his head tilting toward his chest. In that restless sleep, he saw himself looking down at the dead body of his older sister, Selma, who claimed there were people living inside of her air conditioner, that devils were pinching her and a myriad of other nightmarish fantasies. He awoke with a start. The memory of the dream felt like ashes in his brain, but it vanished, leaving him with a residue of dissatisfaction of something left undone.

#

He left the chair and stood at the window again. Close by the scream of a siren hunted through the darkness, entering his consciousness to make him aware of the darkling plane ahead of him, and his fear of what he and Cynthia would find when they reached it. The weight of that thought was almost insupportable, and again he wept…