The warm, muted oranges of sleep swam around Joel like gusts in a sandstorm. Tides of soundless tangerine moved through his mind and were dissipated by the sound of someone calling his girlfriend’s name, Lauren, blue and gold, a ribbon of silk whispering through his dreams.
Joel opened his eyes. It was still dark, but the first signs of dawn were visible through the open windows. Beyond that there was nothing but the warmth of her body beside him and the dim smell of her, like crushed autumn leaves.
“Lauren.”
Joel sat up in bed. He could see the speaker now, a silhouette in the doorway, pinched shoulders, one thin arm held against the doorframe as if to support the room. It was her father. Before he could react Joel felt movement beside him. There was a soft white click, and the room was filled with light. Lauren sat up, eyes half shut, still half asleep. Her father was already dressed, a belt cinched around his waist like the ties that held together the bundles of straw spotting his property. His words were dark bands, ochre and rouge filaments that arced through Joel’s mind like fingers of electricity.
“Your brother’s been in an accident. We have to go to the hospital.”
They had come to stay with the Weiss’s for the Thanksgiving Holiday, rumbled up the pocked, soft-shouldered road in Joel’s ancient Honda, Joel feeling the black and yellow pops and rattles, feeling the colors rather than seeing them, which is how he explained his condition when people asked. And people liked to ask. Lauren’s parents had been fascinated, saying the word over and over again in all its marbled white and gold brilliance. Synesthesia. A word smooth and glimmering like a faucet handle in the bathroom of an expensive hotel, not because of what it meant, but simply because that’s the color it was, as simple and innate a quality as the warmth of a cat asleep in one’s lap. He went through his usual speech, about how each letter of the alphabet had a different color all its own, a color which never varied. The same went for the days of the week, and notes in a scale (though he didn’t particularly care for music and often wondered if he was tone deaf). He told them how Joyce had it, how Nabokov had it, and how one in several thousand had it. He wasn’t special, just that one in several thousand. Several thousand, another phrase that glimmered. Several, clear white like the light caught in a water glass. Thousand, a royal blue that came like a splash at the end of the phrase, a double burst of star shine.
Lauren also found it fascinating, but had never considered him a spectacle or a curiosity, which may have been why it was her bed he was sleeping in, and her parents he was staying with for Thanksgiving, and why it mattered at all to him that her brother had been in an accident, a word which was, by pure coincidence, a burning orange. The color of flames and blood.
# # #
The sun had appeared, a wedge of dim heat on the lip of the field. Joel stood in the driveway and watched as the Weiss’s truck disappeared around the bend. Lauren and Joel were to follow them to the hospital in the Honda. Joel shivered in his overcoat, hands buried in the pockets, feeling the crumbs and old receipts and wadded bits of candy wrappers that lived there. He felt a tightness in his chest, just below his throat, and concentrated on it, this imaginary sensation caused by worry and pain. What possible evolutionary benefit did such a reaction provide? Over his shoulder the car engine rumbled, sending black spots like horse flies through Joel’s brain. He barely noticed them.
“Okay, let’s go.”
Lauren had emerged from the house and was pulling on a pair of fingerless gloves. She waded across the uneven driveway. The mud had frozen overnight and formed a treacherous sea of hard curves and divots. Joel slipped into the driver’s seat and pressed his hands against the air vents, letting the hot air bake through his frozen fingers. Lauren climbed in next to him. Several minutes later they were off through the empty morning, the car rattling its message of yellow-jackets: yellow-yellow-black-yellow-black-black. Joel ignored them. Instead he watched her through his peripheral vision, seeing the way her hands shook when she propped her sneaker against the dash to tie the laces.
“Did your Dad say...?”
“You want to take a left up here to get to St. V’s,” she said. Trees passed silently, divided by the occasional farm house, set far back on its lot as if afraid of the road. A fence in need of repair, a silo. “He’s asleep,” she added a moment later.
“What does that mean? Like, in a coma?’
“He didn’t say.” She pushed the hair away from her face with both hands, drawing in a deep, shuddering breath. “He just said asleep.”
She had the most beautiful voice he’d ever experienced, a voice that emulated the sea-blue and lavender tones of her name. Purple light through morning fog, was how he’d described it during their courtship. He meant it with sincere awe but she laughed at him. “That’s what you tell all the girls,” she teased. But it wasn’t. She was different. She had a cool, peaceful softness that shone through every word she said, and he felt giddy, almost guilty, that he alone could sense it in this special way. Even now in her pain and frustration and concern this softness came through and it soothed him.
The traffic lights shone through the mist at an empty intersection, the earliness of the hour and the heavy, low clouds robbing them of their color. Everything felt so dead and pale that Joel wanted to close his eyes and listen to the secret life in things, the hidden sweetness that hid behind everything. Joel thought of her brother in his dark, silent place, and wondered how that color spoke to him now. In the beat of his own heart? The pain in his body? Somehow the message came through, Joel was sure of it, that message of life in everything. He wanted to communicate this to Lauren, explain to her his own meager theology, but his words would have been flat to her, as implacable and useless as the tightness in his throat. Instead he reached across the seat and took her hand and squeezed.
The light changed and they drove on. He listened as her breathing turned shallow, and eventually into heavy, crimson sobs that filled his vision like a flurry of autumn leaves.
No comments:
Post a Comment