DREAM DOOR

 

In the dream there is a small hidden door in my mother's bedroom, the kind that was once used for ice deliveries in old apartment buildings, or a crawl space leading to a tangle of wires, spiderwebs, and rusty pipes. But when I bend low to open it, the exact same room appears on the other side, the same bedside table and lamp, the same red bedspread, the same bottles lined up like a miniature skyline. In fact, the whole interior of the house is there, in reverse. Though I am very young, I can walk through it by memory, taking a left where normally I would go right. I can hear and smell coffee percolating from the kitchen, a television sounding low and far away. But nothing happens in this dream. It is merely a feeling of calmness I have walked into, the very strangeness of the mundane. No one is shouting here. No one is leaving. There are no sirens wailing outside the window, no red lights reflecting against the glass. It is impossible for me to tell if this is before, or after, or never was. It is a dream that I tell to no one, for there is nothing to tell. But after I wake, it's a dream I immediately want to get back to. But of course I can't return. I can never return.

MY MOTHER AT EIGHTY-SIX, RECOVERING FROM AN ISCHEMIC STROKE

 

This isn't the first time she has left this way -- hovering between sleep and awake, speech and silence, breath and no breath. When we were kids, the pills and the Stoli nearly washed her away, bringing her only partway back. The ECT and barbiturates softened her eyes to a blue-tinged fog, a weather we could not grasp. But this time she seems closer to the further shore, more resigned to stand among its trees and shadow. Her body sleeps on one side, like a child nuzzling closely in the first chill of autumn. The words that come now, if they come at all, tumble out in fragments, like the torn scripture of some long lost gospel. They break free of source and context, uncertain but continuing, trailing off like the memories she has spent a lifetime trying to erase. This woman, stubborn as the sun and moon, whose version of Jesus brandished a sword toward the open sky, offers neither confession nor consolation. She travels silently on wheels now, waiting without expression for her lunch and medication, for whatever can be easily recognized, waiting for her own version of leaving to return.

THE UNSPOKEN

 

Part of Uncle Silas always resided in absence, the quiet and the still, his handsome face just off to the side in old photographs, gazing over his shoulder into the distance, or down at the solemn and familiar earth, smiling slightly, as if some joke or pleasantry had been spoken between them. Unlike my father, he took the cure for booze at the clinic in Duluth, telling no one, returning weeks later, clean-shaven and rested, as though he had merely driven to the grocery store and back. When he married, later in life, he didn't bother to inform the family, so averse was he to drawing attention to himself. He worked at the hospital up in Hibbing, learning the secret language of blood through the thumbnail lens of a microscope. He called it a dance. When ALS came to rob him of his touch, and then his speech, his limbs hardening like the branches of a weathered tree, he retreated further. I can see his sturdy frame receding, folding into itself, can see the old black-and-white television flickering, the news already old somehow. I can see the newspapers he could no longer hold stacked up beside him, all those words and faces gone blank, all those stories -- like his own -- waiting to be told.