He was woken by the sound of a tortoise-shell pick dragged quick across silver strings. He has been told it is an after-effect he should expect to endure for some time into the future. The analyst who explained it to him turned his own description at an odd angle, so that spill (not hope, but something light, something allied to the antiDark) drained the remembered terror like a leech. Think of it as the heavy tumbling clockwork of lights in an industrial park, coming on after a period of long neglect, vandals having busted every window in his four-story façade. Expected for some time into the future. The opening credits of ‘Chain Gang Fever’, the opening credits of ‘Runaway Sally’. He blends them together and comes up out of the halfway house of sleep-not-sleep. It’s dark outside and very cold but warm here in the mummy-wrap of bathrobe and blankets, frayed by companionable dogs, thin as worn out care. He tries to imagine the memories he no longer has. The damaged ones come natural. The invented ecstasies and contentments prove harder to sustain, looping madly near the middle and blurring right about now. If he continues to lie still, dozing in and out of picnics and wedding receptions and inspecific erotic take-down stances, perhaps someone will bring him a cup of tea and tap the face of his alarm clock with soft disapproval. The prize for doing nothing is the passage of time, which in itself appears to be a good thing, though why this is he doesn’t know and is afraid to stun the bubble by any low trick such as turning his head to set the cobwebs in cascade. He numbers down the cells, numbers down the islands where his body registers a moment of touch. If he dwells, the island sings, a coin of pain. The bridge of his nose, one or the other of his cheekbones (left is the side closest to falling off the bed), a rib, a joint, his thigh perhaps, an archipelago of suddenness from shin to ankle.
For the hundredth time in the space of a minute he wakes up. Blue bulb greets him high up on the ceiling and then isn’t there. He thinks he could describe it in great detail but that wouldn’t bring it back. He moves his fingers into focus, fluttering them in slow imitation of the whispers in the hallway leading to and from his bedroom door. His index traces the back of a stylized wave, the rise and fall from bold to furtive. Sleep this heavy is the spell and product of one blue bottle and seven red and white pills. His bruised analysis, the clarity of his grip on numbers is its own reward. The colors are as they appeared to him when the shadows tilted down across last night’s sun, although he wouldn’t swear to it in any court of law, under any circumstance of cross-examination short of a promise of immediate reprieve and everlasting forgiveness.
He wills the tub to plug and fill, the rubato of waters slightly clouded by intense heat. The plumbing shrills and bleats between the walls, Edwardian bagpipes that amaze by never rupturing, given the violence of their complaint, given the daily shuddering-down of plaster into mite-size pyramids. He wills himself to float upon the taste of tears, to watch the nerveless change from white to pink as his body sinks back and settles in the bathwater just shy of scald. Three days into the cure.
72 hours still to go. Six of one, half a million of the other, difference trailing out from near to close to passing through and ceasing to exist except as buried memory, so deeply buried as to be fiction, myth, a twitch of zero spectral over nil. The effort of soap into lather brings tears to his eyes, diluting the sweat rolling down in rivulets from his shocked scalp. Weeping relieves the sting of salt somewhat. He paws himself like a berserker, water rocking in its rhino thrash, soap bubbles forming in the oddest places, doming over folds he hadn’t noticed before. Bone pile tumped randomly into a bag of rubbery pink. His brain is squabbling with itself, a book-burning staged in the stadium of his skull. A Viking bellows, a Pope shrieks in his shroud, grips the armrests of his incandescent throne, the Queen of the Faeries hacks a swath with her wand of willow and mouths ‘I told you so’. Only she didn’t, of that much he is certain and so the treacheries of her little teeth snap and fade.
He toes the plug from the sucking drain, hears the sigh of the subsiding flood, says a prayer, makes the sign of the eleventh-hour cross and rises in a cloud of opulent steam. Naked, and trembling, and complete, his eyes follow with some concern as the fog bows all around him and tenderly leaves the room. Dawn’s white light leans in at the bedroom window. Beads and spots reveal themselves a moment before they vanish. 71 hours to go. 4,260 minutes to go. 255,600 seconds to go.
Silver strings hum to each other, slipping in and out of tune, rising to the bait, gobbling for the hook.